580 sli triple head togo temps

[lazduc]

Folks,
I installed a second 580gtx into my system. The MB is a evga x58 ftw3. The 3 available pci-e slots are two 16x and one 8x. The two 16x of course are the ones I used. They are close together. If I separated the cards to provide a slot in between them, then the lower card will run at 8x in slot 3. So with the cards hugging each in slot 1 and 2 the temperature is as follows....The upper card will get up to 80c and the lower card will stay around 48 to 50c. running a game. They drop in temp as soon as there is no loading.

Think the temps are too high? The case is a coolmaster..tall tower simular to the haf. Lots of fans. 1200watt power supply. Lots of air movement.
About the only solution I can think of is to get an asus mb where the pci-e slots are futher apart. Any thoughts?

Lazduc

 

[werbo]

If I'm not mistaken, aren't the pci-e slots slowed down to 8x in sli anyways? so wouldn't it not matter if you moved the second card to the third slot to give more space?

 

[ubercake]

Those temps are not bad for the 580. It has a max rated temp at 97C. You're not even close. 80C is not bad at all. Mine are reference and commonly reach 91C at full load on my x58 board. What kind of 580s are you working with? They must have decent cooling solutions.

You run at 16x/16x when you use the first two PCIe 16x slots on that board. You can download GPU-z to confirm this. If you populate the 3rd slot (closest to the bottom of your case), that's when 8x comes into the picture.

Everything's just fine with your setup.

 

[Specop]

Personally I hate seeing high temps on my cards, especially because over time it can cause warping and thus damage to the GPU. There was a great article I read when chosing my Mobo (asrock 970) about how SLI scales with bus speeds (16x/16x, 16x/8x, 8x/8x, etc). I can't locate the article atm, but I'm sure if I spent some more time I could find it, but in short it came to the conclusion that there is no bottle neck on 8x/8x unless you are running at extremely high resolutions (I.E. triple monitors).

So in short, I'd space them apart and see if they get better temps, because having a lower temp on your primary card (the first one that is at 80c) could actually lead to better FPS for you and if not at least it leads to a longer life span. Also, if I am not mistaken, some boards will allow you to run 16x/8x so you might want to check your specs for SLI.

Regardless though, unless you are using three monitors, I'd space them out, lower temps are better for the card and even if it ends up 8x/8x there won't be a bottle neck for you.

 

[lazduc]

Thanks for the response guys. I am driving a triple head togo which is connected to three 19in viewsonic monitors. 3840x1084.

I guess I do not understand the x16 and the x8 on the PCIe slots. I thought if I installed to the bottom slot which is x8 it would half my data streams....so why bother with two cards if one is only running at half speed.

Impatient I am. Last night I ordered a new mother board, cpu, memory, cooler and two hard drives. They will be here tomorrow...tonite is Thursday and I went with overnite delivery. I will sell the other motherboard, cpu, memory and cooler. I have a 40gb ssd I will put win7on along with drivers and put all the other programs on the big drives. Thats the way I have it set up now on the older system. Fast boot.

The new setup is asus p8z68 deluxe, with a i7 2600k, 8gb of ddr3 fast clock, zalman super cooler. The old system was a evga x58 with a i7950, 12 gb of triple channel, zalman super cooler.

The asus motherboard has 3 x16 PCIe slots. Room between the slots 1 and 2 which run at x16.....hope this solves the heat issue. Wow I just spent 700 bucks to protect a 500 dollar card. Well I will recover a few buck back when I sell the older setup....which is only about 2 months old and has less than probably 8 hours running time.

All this to run flight simulators.

Another question besides the x16 andx8 PCIe .....when I reload Win 7 on the new ssd is Microsoft going to say I have already installed this and I have to purchase another operating system???? Or can I just reload my current Win7 Ultimate again??

Reason I went with new drives is I may sell them with the older (lol) system. I will wipe the old ssd drive so no operating system remains.

Sorry for the long post.
Lazduc